This is at our community carnival tonight. I am sick. I am still struggling for words to describe this. ETA: This is like the ping pong ball game where you try to get the ping pong ball into one of the fish bowls to win a goldfish, but you win one of these precious creatures. Yep, there was a booth to win goldfish too.
Not to mention there was a guy, a “carney” I guess you could call him, in a booth there making money off of dumping his rat out of a tin can onto a spinning roulette-type wheel with a hole at the end of each color (something like wheel of fortune) and the people were betting money on which color the rat would choose to go into the hole.
Wtf
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Sadly not the first time I’ve seen something like that… but definitely not something I’ve seen for a very long time. Sometimes you could win the little african dwarf frogs…when I was very young, people would win hatchling water turtles or hermit crabs. That was when I was growing up in NY. As an adult in Southern CA, I haven’t seen anything like this in recent little fairs and such, but they probably happen in some areas.
I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to petition against this outside of contacting animal control… But if they’re just handing off animals without care guides or any mention of zoonotic diseases, I think they can step in.
As a big box pet shop employee, I had to shut down some people planning to do events or party gifts/decorations with goldfish and such. Most of them understood once I explained that
-without the right setup, most of what they bought would die.
-they can carry salmonella.
-if they DO live, they get quite large and live a long time so putting them in a bowl to suffer is even crueler than using them to feed another animal.
I think the exception to this was the regular customers I would see for Ramadan. They would look for me personally so they can doublecheck the temporary bowl care, ask me for a few feeder fish I could hand pick for them…and they would give them to neighbors with a pond after. One even started their own pond and showed me pictures of the ‘lucky goldfish’ after a year.
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Ahh, I remember that goldfish ping pong ball game. I went through sooo many of those goldfish as a kid. And I vaguely remember that color wheel rat game too. Such great childhood memories. I loved the carnival as a kid. It was a different time back then. We were oblivious to how cruel we were to those poor creatures. I’m surprised to hear these games still exist.
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I remember winning a goldfish at our local county fair when I was a kid. Luckily for the fish, my mom was a fish nerd (she’d had a marine reef tank before I was born), so she made sure we set that goldfish up right in a large tank with filtration and plants and decor and the whole thing. That goldfish lived 10+ years and got huge. But most fair fish aren’t that lucky and end up living short, miserable lives, which is really sad. It’s disturbing that that’s still happening, and that they’re consigning other species to similar fates.
Animals should not be used in carnival games. Not as prizes, not as props, not as anything. It’s disheartening that that still happens. People should know better by now. 
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I have to say I was guilty of the goldfish thing once when our daughter was young. Like you @jawramik we took the time to make sure we did research and had decent setup for “Sandra” and she lived a nice life. But that’s when I really started thinking about how so many others probably die because people don’t bother to even buy them a tank at all and/or don’t know how to care for them. I get that they’re part of the food chain but it’s sad that the carnivals still allow this. I’d never seen anoles as prizes ever. Not to mention it was 95°, humidity was awful and they were sitting in direct sunlight.
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